


Golden Circle

by Saeriellyn



Category: Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander
Genre: Between Books, Death, Emotional Baggage, F/M, Gen, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Life Cycle, Mild Fluff, Nature, Rain, Seasons, Snow, Weather, Wholesome, country living, deep thoughts, fall leaves, shortfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:21:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27065554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saeriellyn/pseuds/Saeriellyn
Summary: Four seasons, one cycle of healing.Shortfic collection over Eilonwy's first year at Caer Dallben.
Relationships: Eilonwy/Taran of Caer Dallben
Comments: 17
Kudos: 6





	1. First Rain

_A slice of light shifted places_

_with a sliver of darkness_

_clouds unwrapped a storm_

_in the unwalled meadows of air_

~Cora Vail Banks

* * *

It’s only her second day at Caer Dallben, when it rains the first time.

Not the first time in her life, of course. She’s well-acquainted with rain: that cold, grey, miserable substance whose frequency had made the cheerless interior of Spiral Castle even more chill and damp, its clammy breath impossible to bar out by shuttered casements or drive away with hotter hearthfires. It was the goad that had driven away what few rays of sunlight had crept past the walls to wink timidly within the fortress’s unfriendly courtyards. It was the unbidden traveling companion on their journey to Caer Dathyl, chasing them all from open meadows to the dismal cover of dripping trees, turning the ground to slippery, squelching muck beneath their feet, their clothing to sodden, dragging weight at their backs.

So it is unwelcome now, so soon, just when she’s getting used to working in the garden. She’s been happy, blissful even, surrounded by the sharp smells of sap and root, the green, light-filtering rows of leaves, the fluttering butterflies and droning bees. It’s hot work, but satisfying, and now _this_ : this spotting of the bare earth at her knees, a warning message from the woolly gray smudge obscuring the summer sky, which up until now had been a sea of calm blue. Straightening from her task, she looks around, sees it coming: a curtain of haze blotting out the green hills to the southwest, its surface striped with darker streaks. A damp breeze lifts the sweaty strands of hair from the edges of her face like caressing fingers, but she feels nothing but resentment.

“Rain’s coming,” she announces, preparing to rise and dust off her skirts, but her companions, working in the rows nearby, only glance up mildly. At the sight of the oncoming shower, Coll smiles, his brown face creasing like the wrinkles on a drying apple.

“Ah,” he says, “good. Days overdue, that is. It’s good luck you are, lass. Must’ve brought it back with you.” His hoe ceases not in its movement, a series of pulling slices so rhythmic and gentle that they seem unconnected to the weeds scraped root-bare at the end of his blade. Taran rolls his eyes, bemused at the comment, but, seeing her watching, flashes his lopsided grin at her before returning to his work.

She waits, expectant, but there is no indication of imminent departure. “Shouldn’t we go in?”

Taran glances up again, surprised. “Go in, why?”

She’s almost too astonished to be indignant at such a foolish question, but a little ire does seep into her retort. “Because of the _rain.”_ The spots on the earth are now joined by others, freckling the dirt; a muted percussion like hundreds of tiny footsteps has begun to tickle at her ears, layered over by the warm gravel of Coll’s sudden laugh.

“We don’t stop work for rain, love - not unless it’s coming down like old-women-and-sticks! We’d get little done, else.” He grounds his hoe for a moment, and bends his back at a reverse angle, working out the kinks. “Summer rain’s a gift. Cools us down, and brings life to thirsty crops. You mark it, now - smell the air as it comes on. You’ll see.”

“But,” she stammers, “we’ll be soaked.”

“We’ll dry off,” Taran grunts, “nothing to fuss over. You’ve got spare clothes.” He glances her way again, looking somewhat askance at her confusion, and his mouth twitches wryly. “Come, Princess, you who are so proud of your ancestry. No one who claims kinship with the entire _sea_ should be put off by a bit of rain.”

He’s called her “princess” for the last two days whenever she’s complained or gotten upset about something, a subtle dig that irritates her beyond speech, and stings, too, somewhere deep. She scowls at him and he shrugs, chuckling, grasps the handles of the wheelbarrow and trundles off toward the barnyard for a fresh load of manure, unconcerned with the rapidly-increasing sprinkle.

Somewhat bewildered, she returns slowly to her task of turning over the spent and chopped beanstalks, raking them into the topsoil, mixing and tamping it down. The top layer is damp now, beneath the pattering drops, as are her garments and hair and her bare forearms and feet. Rain mingled with sweat makes her skin salt-sticky, and she feels herself shrink small, trying to avoid the sensation. She works doggedly, swallowing further protest in embarrassment.

But she mutters to herself as the sprinkle turns to a drizzle and the drizzle to a steady pelting, and the water skims from the curls at her temples and down her cheeks, droplets quivering at the end of her nose, at the ends of her braids, washing the salt from her skin and down, carrying it into the earth.

The smell of her own body cooling, of the upturned soil, wet and glistening, rises to her face, fills her nose and mouth and lungs, and she pauses, presently, thoughtful. _Smell the air as it comes on._ Well, here it is, and the air is...is... _oh_.

She inhales, sudden and deep, conscious of the change, her fingertips tingling. _What is it?_ Something rising up from the quivering turnip leaves or the rich loam, or condensing itself from the very air. Something rich, and deep, and vital; if _green_ had a smell, if _good_ had a smell, and _sprouting_ and _beginning_ and _growing_ , it might be this thing shimmering savory upon her breath right now. She shuts her eyes, turns her face up toward the giving sky, and smiles without knowing it, sensing the pulse of life in the space around her, the fluid, ripe current of the rain mingling into the open warmth of the ground.

Sweetness fills her mouth in a gush of warmth, as though she’s just crushed a ripe berry in her teeth, and for just a moment, a suspended, heart-pounding _second_ , she can _feel_ every raindrop, not “the rain” as a formless mass of broken water, but _each individual drop_ , as unique and perfect as if they were solid diamonds, or bits of crystal cut from the stars and fallen to earth. It’s a rush of sensation, a glimpse of something beyond her reach, and the glittering delight of it makes her open her eyes with a gasp, swept with a perception of something somehow familiar. The droplets on her arms and hands cling like tiny sentient creatures, unwilling to be separated from her.

Coll is watching her curiously from his row, and nods when she notices. “You see,” he says simply, with a knowing smile.

“What makes it happen?” she demands breathlessly. “Is it magic?”

He laughs again. “Bless you! It’s just earth and water and sunlight, mixed up and doing what they were meant to do. But together they forge life itself, so I suppose that _is_ magic, of a kind.”

_Water and sunlight,_ she thinks to herself wistfully, watching a droplet tumble from her fingertip. _I am fire and water. I should know these things. I should...be able to..._. Another drop gathers, its bottom edge swelling and rounding and dangling, and she tries to wrap her mind around it, to recapture that tingling moment of ecstatic awareness. The sweet fluidity teases at the edges of her mouth, but she does not know the words to give it form, and the drip falls, releasing its broken fullness to the earth. _To forge life._ She sighs.

Taran is returning with the wheelbarrow, his wet clothes sticking to him like plaster, his dark head sleek and shining —as drenched as though he’d been drowned, yet looking elated, brimming with energy. He dumps the barrow and shakes his wet hair out of eyes glowing green in his sun-brown face and _he’s all brown and green,_ she thinks suddenly, _just like the garden_ , and something in her chest twists and expands open with a warm and wistful ache.

He grins at her, that crooked streak of white. “Not washed away yet, I see.”

She forces herself to make an impudent face, because it’s what he expects, and because it’s more comfortable, by far, than the face that had almost been surprised out of her, which scuttles away and buries itself behind her consciousness, not ready to be seen by anyone.

“ _You_ need washing,” she retorts, “after carting all that manure. We could smell you before we saw you, so thank goodness for rain.”

He laughs, and throws a clod at her, earning a mild reproof from Coll.

Overhead, a ray of sunlight rips through the clouds, turning the tumbling drops into stars.


	2. First Fall

_Autumn, you turned_

_each leaf_

_into a letter inviting the wind_

_to its own celebration_

~Cora Vail Brooks

* * *

"Does it bother you," she asks, "killing things?"

Coll's hands, busy scraping the fat from the deer hide stretched across the frame before him, slow to a somber pause. In silence, she waits, sensing something heavy and bleak in his stillness. "Aye," he sighs at last, in a voice like gravel. "Aye, _cariad_ , it does. I take no pleasure in it."

She reaches out her hand - strong and sun-gilded for the first time in her memory - and touches the golden-brown fur at the edge of the hide. It is silky but not soft; the winter undercoat pushes out the prickling outer hairs into a standing-up stiffness, glittering in the fading light of the smoky afternoon. She thinks of Medwyn and his valley, and the fawn that had pushed its velvet nose beneath her palm, and pulls her hand away abruptly, as though her fingers stung.

"We could just eat turnips," she offers sadly, a counter to the justification no one had spoken.

Coll smiles a little, his sinewy brown hands at work again; Coll's hands are never still for long. "You'll get plenty tired of turnips before spring," he says wryly, "and cabbages and beans, hearty as they are, won't fill your belly through a long winter, nor would there be enough for all of us. Meat we must have, at least a little, whatever, to weather the snow. And leather for shoes and caps, fur to warm your hands and ears, and tallow for candles and lamps."

"I suppose," she sighs, and returns to her own work: braiding the long stems of bright oak leaves together, into garlands for harvest cheer, a wreath for the door. They fill her lap like a pool of ragged fire, scarlet and crimson and gold, parchment-thin, cool in her hands. "Medwyn got along without all that, though, somehow," she remembers, thoughtful.

Coll grunts, and glances up at her wryly. "Maybe he did. But what do those wolves of his eat, d'y'reckon?"

She opens her mouth in surprise and closes it again, considering. He chuckles, "You see? But he doesn't hold it against them. He loves his beasts for what they are. We, also, are what we are."

She stares at the toes of her soft suede boots, stuffed with wool. Warm against the chilled air, she wriggles her feet inside them. "It's a shame it can't all be like wool, though, isn't it? Or like milk and eggs, taken without harming anything."

"Aye," he rumbles again, "but such is the way of it. Life feeds on life. Even vegetables must die to be eaten." He raises his gaze toward the garden plot, looking fondly upon the fallow rows, resting now. "As every living thing, one day, returns to the earth. And so we give life to others in our turn."

She thinks, unwittingly, of grinning white bone, and clawed fingers crumbling to dust around a sword pommel. "Not all of us," she whispers, shivering.

Warm brown eyes flick up quickly at her and then down again. His face is impassive, careful. "It's how it should be, whatever," he murmurs. "Not a cold barrow of stone, but a bed beneath a tree, if the world was at rights. I could sleep well, out there." He nods towards the edge of the woods, where, she knows, others, precious to him, sleep already. "But it's not given most of us to choose." He shrugs, resigned, and continues his work.

She pulls another leaf stem through the braid and gazes out at the trees: a smudged line of glorious colors running together, a flaming banner streaked by lingering threads of clinging green. "I don't like thinking about it," she says slowly. "What do you think happens to us? After?"

"Oof," he sighs, "that's a question for Dallben, not for one such as I."

"I already asked him," she says, with a touch of acerbity. "He said it's not for us to know, and trailed off into I don't even know what-all about eternal mysteries and the energy of the universe." All she had wanted to know was if Achren were really dead, and if there were any way of finding out, but Dallben had moved the topic elsewhere before she could get around to admitting her fears. "I don't think even _he_ knows, really."

Coll's shoulders twitch with the force of a rough chuckle, and he shakes his head. "Well, I suppose that may be a fence even his vine won't climb." He sticks his knife's point into a nearby log, wipes off his hands, and picks up the end of a garland to admire it. "Here's what I do know, _cariad._ Every year these leaves burn to gold, like all the light of summer blazing out of them one last time before they fall, and a beautiful death it is. And next spring, as sure as the sun rises, from every twig will come a new green leaf in place of the one that fell, and more besides. Where the seed falls, there the sprout rises, and life follows death in a circle, always, all things made over new. If that is how the earth makes and remakes its fruit, why should it be any different for us? Eh?"

He rarely makes such a long speech, and she looks at him in wonder, at his creased, open, honest face, his crinkled dark eyes as peaceful as the earth. No, the thought of returning to earth does not disturb him, not Coll; he is already such a part of it that death should be no more than stepping into the door of a home he's loved for years.

She is comforted, but not so resigned.

"I wish we knew for certain," she sighs. "I wish I knew that…that my parents might be waiting for me, just on the other side, you know. That they could tell me if they were."

There's a quaver in her voice, and she hates it, hates how it makes her feel small and alone, and she looks down quickly at the leaves in her lap, and braids feverishly for a few minutes, swallowing whatever it is trying to come up in her throat, blinking away the traitorous welling in her eyes. Coll is silent, settled like a tree, though from the corner of her eye she sees his hands moving.

Then the garland rustles and he leans toward her, his arms raised. She looks up in surprise just as he settles the red-gold leaves, wound into a circlet, upon her head. He sits back, smiling at the effect, and murmurs, "That's a proper crown for our princess, " in a low growl like a bear's, rough with emotion. "Suits you better than cold metal."

Her heart swells. It's an answer - not to her impossible wish, but to something else, something she needs more, maybe, just now, than knowing the unknowable, and she hiccups and smiles back at him, a wavering and watery smile, full of unspoken _belonging_.

"I always liked autumn," she admits, "even though it seemed like I shouldn't. When all it meant was that winter was coming."

"But that's not all it means," he counters, twining a garland around his own bald head. It slips down around his neck, a collar of bright ruffles and spikes, and she giggles. He grins broadly. "It's a reminder that there's beauty even in endings. That what goes away comes back again." With a grunt, he leans forward, and rises to his feet, taking up the deerskin and donning his cap. "Time to go salt this. Need more leaves?"

"Yes," she says, "but I'll get them. I like gathering them up. It feels like treasure-hunting."

He sighs quietly, "Aye, the land provides treasure enough if you know where to look.” Stepping past her, he lays a warm hand on top of her head briefly. “And sometimes it shows up on its own when you never expected it."

She glances up at him, at his sweet and affectionate smile, and he winks and walks away, whistling, into the blue, hazy air. She squints, until his bronze jacket and rust-colored breeches and leather cap are lost, melted away into the browns and reds and ochres of the orchard beyond.


	3. First Snow

_Snow_

_where you would_

_swing your arms_

_into wings._

~Cora Vail Banks

* * *

"Stop _talking_ half a minute," he says, "and _listen_."

She does so, not out of any sense of obligatory compliance but because she is out of breath. The air, sucking sharp into her throat and coming out in cloud-shadows against the white brilliance of the ground, is insufficient for both speech and walking, when walking takes so much effort.

So she falls silent, scowling a little at him, but he only smiles, amused, and whispers again, "Listen."

She listens, into a stillness, a velvet breathlessness. As far as sight, the world sleeps under a diamond-flecked shroud. The trees stand silent around them, branches jutting out in bare and brittle grey bones with the sky pouring blue into the shivering cracks between.

" _Oh_ ," she breathes, a sigh frosting into her hair. Before her eyes, an airy filigree of ice floats over a low-hanging twig. Higher up, every gnarled wooden finger is strung with crystal beads, each shattering the sunlight into sparks.

A tinkle of faery chimes breaks the silence as another tree, somewhere, shakes off its jewelry. Below them, a cloud of snow, blown from a branch by an errant breeze, drifts like a wraith through the dark firs.

"Oh," she says again, past the lump in her throat.

"If you cry," he warns, "the tears'll freeze on your face."

"I'm not _crying_ ," she protests, but she is.

He looks away politely, having learned this much, at least, and says, after a moment, "Why did you make such a fuss about coming out?"

"I've always hated it," she sniffs, swiping at her eyes with the back of a rough woolen mitten. "When everything is freezing and damp, with never enough blankets or stockings or firewood." She sweeps her arm across the expanse of silent, winter-wrapped trees, the smooth flow of dimpled cream beneath. "I've never seen anything like this."

"Not in Spiral Castle, I reckon," he acknowledges. "But didn't you ever go out?"

"Only when Achren made me go into the courtyard with no cloak and stay there until I was shivering and almost blue," she answers, failing to swallow the bitterness in her voice. "She used to punish me that way."

He stares. She pretends not to see the smoldering anger behind his eyes, casting her own down. The white powder underfoot glitters with shards of rainbow fire.

"Then...then you've never actually...you've never just _played_ in it?" His voice is incredulous. She turns to look at him; his nose is a red strawberry over a woolen scarf. His eyelashes, under his fur-lined hood, are frosted white and she wants to laugh but the question makes her too sad.

"I never _played_ anywhere."

He stares again, so long that she's embarrassed. She marches away from him, boots crunching knee-deep through the feathery, blue-shadowed brightness.

She's arrested by the cushioned blow of something thumping between her shoulder blades, something that feels firm but crumbles instantly with a puff and hiss. Startled, indignant, she turns. "Did you just-"

But then her face is slapped full of burning cold softness that turns instantly to wet, freezing froth in her mouth, and she gasps at the shock of it as he brings both mittens to his cheeks in mock remorse. "Oh _dear_ , I didn't think you'd turn around!"

She shrieks and dives, hooking into the snow with both hands, flinging it wildly at him in great fistfuls, missiles too impulsive for accuracy. He dodges them with a whoop, turning to stumble back along the trail they've broken, down the hill toward the cottage, pausing just long enough to pelt her again. It's a mistake; before he can turn back she's plowed into him like a blizzard, sprawling him into a deep bank. He flounders there, bundled-up and clumsy, yelping when she scoops an armful of snow over his face. He roars, scrambling up, shedding white clumps like a bear prematurely awakened from its den. Their laughter curls, dragons' breath, on the icy air.

"I'm _hot_ ," she gasps presently, in astonishment.

He chuckles. "Because you're dressed properly. And you're _moving_. I told you."

She looks down at her layers of wool and grins, throwing back her hood.

"You've got snow in your hair," he observes, with what sounds like admiration, and she feels her cheeks tingle.

"That's _your_ fault."

"I'll teach you to sled next."

She lies back into the drift, staring up, through the white-web embroidery, into the blue. There's a memory, hazy and half-formed; she follows a tall, dark shape and merry laugh; stepping high into deep footprints cut through the cold banks and giggling when strong arms swing her out over the sparkling air. She shuts her eyes, grasping, but it's gone, just like the tiny crystal stars on her sleeve that dissolve into nothing when she looks too close.

"Sometimes," she whispers, "I think I've lived here before."

From the corner of her eye she sees the quizzical angle of his head. "Not _here_ , exactly," she explains, "I...I don't know what I mean. There's something...it's like trying to catch the wind."

"I think I know," he says, after a brief silence. "It's being happy. Being home."

She looks at him then, at that crooked smile and strawberry nose, and then away, because it's too much, still, this happiness; it's a trembling, wavering thing, a candle flame afraid of being blown out before it can grow.

He clears his throat self-consciously at her silence. "I mean...that's how it seems to me. I'm sure it would take longer for you to feel...I mean, I know it's not quite home for you, but I hope it's...that you're..."

She tosses a fistful of snow at him, the flame inside her burning warm. "Stop _talking_ ," she whispers, with a grin, "and _listen_."

_A/N: yes, this one already existed in Hundreds of Words. I just didn’t know it belonged here until now._


	4. First Sight

.... _you wound light spiral stairs_

_placing bundles of light in our arms_

_railings of vines_

_a wreath of bright air_

~Cora Vail Banks

* * *

  
The tree stands a little out of alignment with the rest of the orderly orchard rows, like a soldier briefly stepping out of formation from sheer stubbornness, and she thinks, sometimes, that this is why it’s her favorite.

It’s also the biggest and tallest, as though it had stepped out because it knew that patch of ground a little to the left was the richest and the best. Its gnarled limbs branch out early and low, making easy notches for her feet; she’d memorized them over the past summer and autumn, their sturdy steps a ladder so sure she could ascend with her eyes shut. Climbing up and up, through rustling green and dangling cool globes slowly turning to russet and gold, she had visited nearly every evening, stealing a few precious moments for herself after a long day of work. Just high enough to be thrilling, there was a hollow that perfectly cradled her hips and legs; arranged just so and she could recline as though in a chair carved just for her, her head propped by the bole of the trunk, swaying softly amidst the leaves. Dangling secure in the blue air and the ruffled green, she had breathed in the silence of rustling leaves and buzzing insects, content merely to _be_ , as happy there as in any place she had ever known.

All winter the bare branches were slick and treacherous, and her heavy wool skirts and thick boots and bulky mittens had made climbing impossible, but she had reached out and touched the cold trunk every time she’d had occasion to pass near it, and felt as if she were promising it something, or perhaps it was promising her.

Now it stands, a frame of dark bones misted in clouds of pale, delicate pink. She’s been watching it for a week, waiting, her arms and legs itching, but the muck from melting snow has made shoes an irritating necessity, and it seems sacrilege, somehow, an assault, to place a leather sole upon those friendly limbs that have only known the intimate grip of her bare hands and feet.

But today is the fourth of full sun in months, and the air feels warm and bright and alive, its very essence singing in her ears, a chorus composed of chirping birds and buzzing bees and some silent, joyous whisper from the unfurling green that veils every growing thing. And when Coll says it’s almost time to break the ground and orders Taran into the smithy to sharpen the ploughshares, she knows there’s not much time left to do as she pleases; she’s been warned that once planting starts there’ll be work from dawn to dusk, ever-increasing as the days lengthen again. 

So she strips off shoes and stockings and disappears from the scullery after gathering the eggs, before Dallben can set her any new tasks; she’ll get to them later, but just now, her tree is waiting.

The ground is cool with thin young grass and its soft freshness leaves her unprepared for how rough and prickly apple-bark is under bare feet gone soft over months of being wrapped in wool stockings, and she grimaces a little as she pulls herself into the lowest branches. It’s harder than it was last year; perhaps she’s lost some of her strength over the long winter, but no matter; the hard labor ahead should take care of that quickly enough. Pull, and heave, and throw her arms around the bole, her cheek pressed against the solid wood, and there - she’s panting but safe in the lowest crook, and the rest should be easy, a return to the familiar and beloved.

Except it isn’t, exactly.

The notches and branches are all where they should be, of course, but it feels different, now, the weight and heft of her balance all off-kilter, and she must pause often to re-evaluate her next move. Her elbows and knees seem to stick out too far, fold in too much, and she’s glad no one’s watching, for it feels clumsy and awkward, not the careless flush of lithe vitality she remembers. What is this new twig, shooting out at such an odd angle, stabbing at her? Surely it had not grown over the winter, but she has no memory of it being in her way before.

She’s tempted to feel annoyed, but she’s surrounded by apple blossom, spilling airy perfume like wine for drunken bees, and filling her vision with fluttering pink and white. It’s not possible to be annoyed in the midst of such magic, no matter how breathless she is or how many times she barks her shins on the hard branches. The clutch of her fists upon the living wood is real and good and sure, and she wonders if the tree, waking up, feels anything like she does, exultant in the satisfying stretch of her too-long-dormant limbs.

Up, and up, into the sparkling blue, and here is her triple-limbed seat, just where she remembers, like a waiting friend. “Hullo, you,” she murmurs out loud, and swings into its embrace to settle in.

But it feels different, too, somehow. She squirms, in confusion, trying to find the previous comfort of her favorite perch. But the hollow is inexplicably narrow, too narrow for her to fit comfortably, and a tree doesn’t change _that_ much, no matter...oh.

_Oh. It’s not the tree. It’s me._

All the winter evenings spent carefully ripping the seams from her tunics and gown and letting them out, sewing them back up until the unfaded linen made dark stripes down her sides, flash back at her with new clarity. 

Well, _blast_. 

It is a thing she has mostly ignored, this subtle change in her own shape, one more in a series of intriguing but baffling ongoing transformations that had begun just before she’d come to Caer Dallben but had somehow sped up after she’d arrived, like a boulder gaining speed as it tumbles downhill. She’d swathed herself in shapeless tunics and baggy leggings and gone on with business as usual, broken only by unpredictable bouts of bleeding that had gradually settled, by midwinter, to a regular monthly cycle. She’d been warned about that at least, and Coll had provided her with what she needed with a quiet practicality that eased her embarrassment, and it had been just one more thing to get used to, in a year of novel things, and not so troublesome as one might have expected, but now...

Now she suddenly and irrationally bursts into tears, scrambling back out of her no-longer-perfect seat and clinging to its disappointing limbs; it’s too much, the _changing_ and the _growing_ and the _unknown_ , and she doesn’t even know whether she’s sad about it or just tired of it…and it’s _rubbish_ , anyhow, isn’t it, to be upset? Haven’t they all been _good_ changes? Escaping Achren, coming here, learning to work, to live with and love her strange, cobbled-together family? Even _growing_ is good, is natural, is what’s supposed to happen, something she’d been doing all along quite happily, and now to bawl like an infant just because she can’t sit in the same spot in some old tree, for goodness’ sake! ...And yet she cannot stop; it feels all right, somehow, to cry, and finally she submits to it, crouching on a branch and laying her head against the rough bark with a hiccup and a wavering sigh. 

The tree sways quietly, in that nearly-imperceptible way she can only feel when her eyes are shut, as though it’s the earth, breathing. The smell of the wood, dusty and nutty, presses into her nose, mingling with the honey-sweetness of the blossom all around, and she turns her face toward it until her hiccups stall, until her breath melds into the slow rhythm of the rocking trunk. The wind rustles, and suddenly, to her right, there is a beat of wings and a flutter of tiny peeping sounds, and she opens her eyes, startled, to look toward the noise.

On a crooked branch not much more than an arm’s length away sits a soft dome of dry grass and bracken, and at its edge a tiny wren has just landed, with a beak full of a grub almost as big as its head. It pokes it through the dark hole of the dome and a flurry of movement greets him; the round head and bright dewdrop eye of its mate emerge, cheeping loudly, and the wren flutters backwards and flits away, following some path of its own through the pink-frilled maze of blossom.

She holds her breath, heart pounding in delight and wonder. The tiny clump of grass is drab and unassuming, and it looks as though the slightest tremor of its branch could send it tumbling, yet the promise held in its downy hollow is as big as the whole world, somehow, for that moment, a breathless fragility that must be protected. She wouldn’t have been able to sit here at all, even had she not outgrown it; as thrilling as it would be to watch them, it would have disturbed the parents to have her so near when their young hatched, an intrusion into a sacred space.

Slowly, she edges back down the trunk, down to a spot a few feet lower, one where a crook in the branch provides, if not perfection, at least an acceptable alternative to her favorite space, and far enough away not to disturb the little family, if she’s still and quiet. Perhaps, after the wrens have raised their brood and moved on, she can build a proper seat there, one that fits, or perhaps she’ll wait, and make sure _she’s_ done changing first. 

Though perhaps there will be no _done_. Perhaps it will be _change_ and _change_ , and change _again_ , from now on, as it seems change is the only thing one can really expect with any certainty. Dallben says time is a circle, turning back upon itself, making new of what was old, and old of what was new, again and again, different every year in the same old ways, and that they all recognize it, deep down where the spirit knows things the mind does not. That this is why they look forward to each turning season with such wonder and delight, when every bright falling leaf and glittering snowflake and fresh flower seems as spellbinding a miracle as if it were the first of its kind ever seen.

It makes her head swim to think of it; Dallben’s words are often like that, but for just an instant, looking up through the pink and white and blue, she sees the rim of the sun, a golden circle broken through a haze of thin cloud. In a flash of knowing she cannot explain, she sees it: the tree and the earth and the birds and the blood and breath, fountain and flame within her, all locked into a dance of spiraled dark and light, intersecting and connecting, ring upon ring, endless. 

It’s a flash, like a falling star, gone before she even realizes what she’s seen, but it leaves her with eyes sparkling full, trembling with its beauty. 

Around her, beneath her, the tree trembles too, though there is no wind. 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this all out of order...Winter came first, inspired by a frigid Christmas in New England, and it was a stand-alone in my drabble collection for some time, before Summer gardening and rain intruded with another idea. Autumn and Spring sprung up at last and came full circle like I hoped they would. Thanks for reading!


End file.
